Where is Carl Sandburg? (Sonny Bono is hiding him!)

I have spent the last three hours trying to migrate my favorite ebooks into my mobipocket reader on my PDA. (My ebookwise reader broke a few months ago, and I lost a lot of the public domain titles).

Egads, I just discovered that even though Carl Sandburg has many poems in the public domain, Project Gutenberg has none of the poems on its list. Universities and private individuals have collected poems, albeit in incompetently arranged page layouts.

Carl Sandburg wrote a ton of poetry before 1923, but collections of his weren’t collected until the 1920s. From the standpoint of clearance, it’s much easier to clear complete collections rather than individual poems. He is yet another victim of Tom Delay and Sonny Bono’s attempt to increase the span of copyright. The 1998 Copyright Extension Act is something which affects me almost every day. It makes getting access to certain literary works a real pain.

So, what is incompetently arranged about that version of Cornhuskers? The sections are there, with the poems indented. If you click the “view entire text” link you get the whole books as one HTML file. What does your PDA require that’s not there?

I’m guessing that these poems originally come from TEI files; that’s why everything renders so well.

My only complaint is that the “View entire text” file doesn’t contain links between the Table of Contents and the rest of the text. From the standpoint of ebook conversion, having these internal links makes a lot of sense (so readers can jump around a lot).